Samsung launches 1TB mSATA 840 EVO SSD

[+Salty Dog 68,026]

Samsung has announced a new 1TB mSATA solid-state drive, part of its 840 Evo series of SSDs. Used mainly in notebooks, an mSATA SSD is much smaller than a regular 2.5-inch hard drive, making it useful for smaller computers or as a second hard drive. In some higher-end laptops, manufacturers use both an mSATA SSD (for the OS, so you get faster boot up and loading) and a 2.5-inch mechanical drive (for higher-capacity storage). With the new 1TB (1000GB) mSATA SSD from Samsung, there's now an option to do without the regular hard drive and still get a decent amount of storage.

The Samsung 840 Evo series is the company's latest range of SSDs, using triple-level cell (TLC) flash. This is a more cost efficient alternative to single- and multi-level cell SSDs, enabling Samsung to sell their latest drives at competitive prices. There is a slight compromise to performance, but the significance of this is muted since it is still very much faster than a regular mechanical hard drive.

According to the Korean company, the new mSATA drive has maximum read and write speeds of 540 MB/s and 530 MB/s respectively. This puts it on par with the 2.5-inch version of the 840 EVO, so you won't be getting slower performance just because it's smaller in size.

While the focus is the 1TB mSATA SSD, an industry first, the new drive also comes in 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities.

The retail packaging of the new Samsung mSATA SSD.
 

Although such components are mainly bought by notebook manufacturers who integrate them into their products, a retail box was also shown in the blog post, which means it's likely to be sold to end-users, too.

The announcement was made on the Samsung Tomorrow blog and no price was given. It'll probably not come cheap, though. There's, so far, no such thing as an inexpensive 1TB SSD -- even on sale, the 2.5-inch versions cost about US$500.

The Samsung 840 Evo mSATA SSD will be available in Singapore from January 2014.

 

[Ronin 1,552]

 

 

There's, so far, no such thing as an inexpensive 1TB SSD -- even on sale, the 2.5-inch versions cost about US$500.

 

I think that's a pretty inexpensive SSD at about .50c per GB.

 

Here's my SSD buying history....

 

1/13/2010   Kingston 128 GB SSD $244  (1.91 per GB)
3/13/2010   Crucial 256 GB SSD $699 (2.73 per GB)
12/30/2010 Samsung 256 GB SSD $529 (2.06 per GB)
4/19/2012   Samsung 830 512 GB SSD $719 (1.40 per GB) (note: now a similar drive is less than $400 on Amazon)

 

It costs to be on the bleeding edge!

 

Btw, the mSata is a slot drive, some modern laptops allow a mSata along with a standard 2.5 (or 1.8) inch drive.

 

The typical scenario is to use the faster more expensive mSata as the boot/os drive and store files on slower less critical cheaper secondary drives.

 

I did a lot of development using virtual machines so the performance of the SSD, although expensive, was worth it to me.

[easy44 5,551]

Nice, but out of my price range. Never mind. They will be down to $200 in a year.

[+Salty Dog 68,026]

The 256 GB SSD here in Cebu is around $250. It's an Intel, but I don't know the specs.

[Ronin 1,552]

Intel has always made a good ssd.

 

Inserting a ssd is the biggest performance gain you can get for a non ssd computer, it's really amazing.

[miles-high 3,917]

Intel has always made a good ssd. Inserting a ssd is the biggest performance gain you can get for a non ssd computer, it's really amazing.

My homemade desktop has 6 Intel 256 SSD's, 2 (RAID 1) for OS, 4 for data (RAID 10)... For what I am doing, e.g., Internet, accessing LinC site, Outlook, PowerPoint, occasional photo editing, no big deal...

 

My Surface Pro 2 has 512 SSD... the advantage would be when I accidentally drop the tablet on the floor (not happened yet), throw it away to the desk, etc. when you really need to go to CR (not happened yet either)...